


our words make liars of us all

by Aethelar



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alcohol Abuse, Bilbo goes mad, M/M, Matching up the movie and the book, No happy times here, Open to Interpretation, Vague hinting at things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 09:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1381822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aethelar/pseuds/Aethelar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Bilbo’s pen hovers over the blank page. Ink gathers at the tip, threatening to spill over and ruin the work before he has even begun, but he cannot find the words to write. He cannot recreate his dwarves between two flimsy leather bindings; mere pages of a book cannot contain them, and no story he writes can do justice to the truth.</em> </p><p>The truth is a painful thing, and Bilbo doesn't want to remember what he has done. He doesn't have a choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our words make liars of us all

Bilbo’s pen hovers over the blank page. Ink gathers at the tip, threatening to spill over and ruin the work before he has even begun, but he cannot find the words to write. He cannot recreate his dwarves between two flimsy leather bindings; mere pages of a book cannot contain them, and no story he writes can do justice to the truth.

And the truth…

The truth is a hateful thing, and Bilbo cannot put it to paper for fear that doing so will give it strength. The truth should not be strong. The truth should be weak and pliable, changed to serve and never allowed to govern. This he has always believed. It has saved his life and the lives of his dwarves many times; he is the master of his truth and the truth _must_ obey him.

He writes that he opened his front door and Thorin fell at his feet in a pile of dwarves, and it feels right. Thorin should never be allowed to travel alone; he got lost, his feet straying from the path and his thoughts straying from sense. Better, surely, that he arrived with his company. Better, surely, that this is the truth that Bilbo preserves.

This is how Bilbo writes the story. This is the truth he will tell to those that ask, these are the events that will be chronicled and preserved.

He cannot change everything. He cannot change the fact that he left, that when his dwarves were grieving and in pain he was selfish and refused to stay and comfort them. What he can do, what he does, is remove their grief and remove their pain and remove his duty to those he once called kin. Bilbo’s pen travels easily over the creamy paper and stains it with his truth as he writes of a company of dwarves so carefully not _his_ dwarves that they are barely any dwarf at all. He writes out the laughter and the nights by the fire, writes out a grudging start and the sweet joy of being finally accepted. He writes out family and friendship and love and moments shared that should never be forgotten but that pain him to remember. Sometimes he hates himself for doing it, but he knows it is best that the old truth is lost. The new truth will hurt less when he comes to write the end, and in the end, that is all that truly matters.

He eats sparingly and only when his stomach demands, his mind consumed with the need to record the truth as it should have been before it is too late and it cannot be changed. His memories show him nights filled with fear and terror, aches and pains and anger and stress. All of these, he leaves out, carefully prunes them from the story and rights his wrongs. The truth is that Bilbo was a hero, a hobbit whose strength was in his character and whose character was unfailing. He never made to leave the company in the Misty Mountains and he never lied to Gandalf about his precious ring and the hold he feared it had over him. The Bilbo he is creating is kind and good, everything a hero ought to be but he himself could never achieve.

He is not kind. He is not good. He holds on to grudges and allows his anger to fester into hatred, and he strikes Tauriel and Legolas from the story with an almost savage vindication. The truth is his to change but his changes are limited to his mind and his pages, to the stories that people tell. But the elves – they could have changed everything and the _world_ would have listened and obeyed them. Theirs was the power that day to make death a lie and life the only truth, to turn war to peace and old grudges to new friendships, but they did not. Bilbo writes them as the enemy, and there is no room in his truth for a lowly Silvian elf who could see beyond that and try to do what was right.

At night, Bilbo sees Kíli behind his eyes. He is grey and his face twists in pain; there is an arrow in his leg, and without Tauriel he will die from the wound. Bilbo shakes himself awake and returns to his book. One line, two lines – a paragraph, a chapter. Kíli was never hit, never suffered the pain of orcish poison in his blood. Still, Bilbo thinks he has slept enough. He sits on his front bench and blows smoke rings at the moon and tells himself that this is the better truth.

Bilbo’s dwarves march across the pages of his book and arrive at Erebor together, as they always should have done. Bilbo’s Fíli and Kíli are young and innocent and play magical harps amid the wealth of their people with joy and laughter. He brandishes the scene at his memories and dares them to take that happiness away, dares them to say he should have left Fíli to suffer choosing between his uncle and his brother. It is a kindness, what he does. The dwarves would not understand.

They plague him, his dwarves. Restless and pleading and silently watchful, he can see them in the corner of the room as he writes and hovering by his bed as he fails to sleep. He hides between lines of ink and in the bindings that hold the pages in place and the comforting lies that bend his truth. I will make it better, he promises them. I will write it how it should have gone. They gaze at him with soft reproach and Bilbo’s hands pass over his bread and cheese in favour of the bottles on the highest shelf at the back of the pantry. I will make it better, he repeats, until his vision is hazy and he no longer cares for their disapproving concern.

The pen sits strangely in his shaking fingers, and it takes great effort to drag it across a page that shifts and rolls like a barrel in the Mirkwood river. He grips the table in one hand for balance, and tries again. His Bilbo, the one that is good and kind, takes the Arkenstone to Thorin. The seven dwarven kingdoms honour their oath to the king’s jewel, and they face the dragon alongside the Men of Esgaroth – fighting for them and with them, never against them.

 _You think your dragon would wait, patient and polite, while armies gathered to kill it?_ his dwarves ask, or maybe it is the other Bilbo, the one that is bitter and hurt and angrily crosses through what he has just written.

Bilbo takes the Arkenstone and gives it to Bard of Laketown. In anger, Thorin buries a sword in his traitorous heart, and the hobbit dies slowly and in pain like the miserable wretch that he is.

Bilbo gives the Arkenstone to Thorin, and Thorin honours him with the greatest of jewels and they rule Erebor together as King and Consort.

Bilbo takes the Arkenstone for his own and keeps it until the day he flings it across the battlefield. It strikes Azog and kills him before the pale orc can so much as raise his arm against the line of Durin.

Bilbo leaves the Arkenstone and takes it all at once, and Thorin kills him for it and loves him for it, and everyone lives and nobody dies and Bilbo stays with his dwarves until the end of days.

The bottle in his hand is empty, but he’s sure there’s a bit left in one of the ones on his desk or by his feet. He has been writing for days and the dwarves still are not happy with any of the endings he has produced. They reach for him, guiding his fingers away from his drink and towards a dish of stew, cold and stale. He stares at it and thinks of the heady warmth of body heat and a belly full of Bombur’s finest, and doggedly picks up the pen again.

Thorin’s coronation is a thing of beauty. His robes are deep blue, edged with white fur and embroidered with mithril thread. The crown is golden, sapphires glinting from elegantly ornate settings. His braids are complex, twined with silver thread and studded with shining gems. The braid just behind his left ear is rougher than the others, uneven and lopsided, made by trembling fingers that had never braided before but wished desperately to do so again. Thorin wears it with pride and love.

He is a wise king, slow to anger and reluctant to act in haste. The call him the Stone King, the Living Mountain, and liken him to the rock itself; eternal and unchanging, powerful, protecting. He is the symbol of their home and the hero of their tales. He is loved, and he is feared, in the way that any great being would be. He is justice and he is truth and he guides his people to a better life.

If the king is stone then the princes are a vein of mithril, precious and rare and glowing like starlight walking among the world. Fíli the Gentle, who travels Middle Earth and leaves peace in his wake. They say he could forge an alliance with the orcs, if only he could stand the smell long enough to speak with them. Kíli the Fierce, who passes like wildfire and leaves stories and passion and children practicing with sticks in the street, swearing to be heroes and warriors and kings.

If you threaten one he loves, then Fíli the Gentle will rip your head from your body and paint the sky with your blood. He will go after your allies and your reinforcements and he _will not stop_ until you and your kind are dust on the wind and the world he loves is safe. If you cry too loudly in fear or pain, then Kíli the Fierce will hear you and sit with you in your corner of the murky alley until your tears subside. He will bring you to a place that is warm and he will make sure you are fed and that your clothes are dry and he will stay until he is sure that you will be well, will be better, will be everything he knows you can be.

This is the truth of the line of Durin.

It is a truth that Bilbo knows, a truth that exists in his memories and in the world. It is the _truth_.

 _The truth makes liars of us all_ , one of his dwarves says, though Bilbo could not say which one. He is tired, he thinks, but he does not feel it any more. There is an insistent pounding in his head that has crept into his sight, every pulse of his heart bringing a darkness across the edge of his vision. His garden is over grown and his pantry is bare and the last of the drink has been drunk but all he can do is stare at the page and know that the truth is not enough.

 _Why?_ he asks, cries, sobs as he huddles in the corner of an inner room that is no longer lit by candles. _It’s my truth, only for me._ He can forget his memories, he can rewrite his past. He will never return to Erebor, it matters not whether his truth can be proved right or wrong.

His dwarves look at him with sadness and sympathy. _You don’t believe it,_ they tell him, and the regret echoes around the room until Bilbo has to raise his hands to protect himself from its merciless bite. He crawls from the room and stumbles to his writing desk and pours a bottle of ink over the pages he has written, then another, a third, pushing the ink around with his hands until the words are dead and _thorin stone king, fíli the gentle, kíli the fierce_ never existed.

He daubs the walls with the ink that runs down his arms and stains his shirt and he writes everything for the first time with no changes, no careful shaping, no dishonesty. The words are smeared and rough and barely legible but he doesn’t care – it is not the truth, it is a confession. He writes of love and betrayal and destiny and a broken dwarf that called his name like a dying man. He writes of pain and agony and shame and grief, and the whispers in the shadows that said death would have been a kinder fate than this. Most of all, he writes of a foolish hobbit that thought he was clever and thought he was good, and thought he could hold the world in his palm and keep it safe from harm.

His words damn him as stupid and selfish and cruel and Bilbo knows it to be true. Across the misty mountains, there are dwarves that need him, dwarves that he ran away from because he couldn’t help them. Bilbo draws a blank page to him, and Fíli and Kíli die in a single line. With grim determination, he adds the death of Thorin – and it was only his weakness, a last attempt to make the truth a better thing, that allowed Thorin to grant and be granted forgiveness before he died.

 _No,_ his dwarves tell him, shaking their heads. They read the words as though in physical pain and turn to him with desperation in their eyes. _You don’t believe this._

 _It is the truth,_ Bilbo says, and it settles in his mind. He puts the pages aside, careful to keep them from the ink that covers his desk and runs in black rivers down his walls. He will write the rest later, perhaps never, but for now he is done.

In the morning, his dwarves are gone. He cleans the study and discards the ruined pages and removes the empty bottles from his floor. That afternoon, he goes to the market and smiles at a dozen hobbits whose names he can’t recall and returns home to pantry as well stocked as any respectable hobbit’s should be.

He tells Hamfast that he has been away, another adventure – only a small one, just to clear his head. The gardener shakes his head in concern, but does not doubt the truth of Bilbo’s words.

 _Will you tell us what happened, one day?_ he asks.

Bilbo thinks of a king that was a respected leader but never a lover, and his two nephews who laughed and smiled and never had cause to frown or fear. He thinks of dwarves that were good company, but never kin, and a journey that was hard but never broke him apart.

 _Perhaps one day,_ he says, _but I hardly see the need._

He knows the truth and it is better than the alternative, and that is all that matters in the end.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a tumblr! Come find me at [aethelar.tumblr.com](http://aethelar.tumblr.com)


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